Where the government faltered, senior bureaucrats say, was in its
failure to reach out to the families despite being in constant touch
with them for nearly four years.

Relatives of Harsimran Singh, who was killed in Mosul, in Babowal village, Amritsar

When it comes to Indians in distress overseas, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has rarely been caught on the wrong foot. From visas for stranded Indians to evacuating seafarers from trouble spots, Swaraj has never been more than a tweet away as she galvanises a notoriously apathetic bureaucracy to come to the aid of Indians. But her March 20 announcement in Parliament that the 39 Indian construction workers missing in Iraq had been killed in cold blood by terrorist group ISIS earned Swaraj and the government a fair share of criticism. The announcement brought closure to a nearly four-year saga for the families of the 39 missing persons-22 are from various districts of Punjab, including Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala and Jalandhar. The rest belong to West Bengal, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh.

The family members, who had been living on hope and assurances from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) that their kin were alive, were livid when they got to know of their deaths on television. "For the past four years, the MEA was telling me they were alive. Don't know what to believe anymore," Gurpinder Kaur, sister of Manjinder Singh, one of the deceased workers, said soon after the announcement. "I am waiting to speak with her (Swaraj). No information was given to us, we heard the statement she made in Parliament."

The armed forces insist the next of kin of deceased soldiers are informed before their names are flashed in the media. This protocol was not followed in the case of the murdered Indians. The government followed the correct procedure in waiting for conclusive proof that the 39 had been murdered, reportedly a day before Swaraj's announcement.

Swaraj cannot be faulted for informing Parliament about the deaths. It would have amounted to contempt of Parliament if she had announced such a significant news at a press conference while the House was in session. Where the government faltered, senior bureaucrats say, was in its failure to reach out to the families despite being in constant touch with them for nearly four years. "The foreign minister was right in first informing Parliament, it's just that they should have also simultaneously informed the families," says a former diplomat who did not want to be named. Reaching out to the families across states would have, at best, been a minor coordination matter between the home ministry and the MEA and dispatching officials to their homes. It would have taken just a fraction of the effort Swaraj's ministry has expended over nearly four years in trying to locate the deceased workers.

To be fair, the MEA under Swaraj worked hard to locate the missing workers. The bloody saga, which began with the abduction of 40 construction workers when ISIS overran Iraq's third largest city Mosul in June 2014, just days after the Narendra Modi government was sworn in, was effectively Swaraj's first overseas challenge. Their disappearance was raised at various international forums by Prime Minister Modi. Swaraj herself had tirelessly pursued their cause and her junior minister, General V.K. Singh (retired), flew to Mosul to search for the missing after the city had been liberated by Iraqi forces last July.

The government disregarded the claims by Harjit Masih, the 40th worker who escaped from ISIS captivity, that all his co-workers had been killed. The MEA chose to believe the assurances given by two heads of state that the workers were alive, until General V.K. Singh was led to mounds in a village of Badush, in Nineveh province outside Mosul, last July. The bodies were excavated from the mass grave.

It turns out the workers had been murdered execution style-single bullets to the head-soon after their abduction as far back as in June 2014. The remains were matched against the DNA samples extracted from their relatives in India by the Martyrs Foundation, a government-run organisation in Baghdad. The foundation's grim fingerprint match was what prompted Swaraj's statement in Parliament. The remains of the Indians are now set to be repatriated from Iraq back to India over the next few days. Another prolonged wait for the bereaved families.

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